Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa
businessinsider.comI think the real problem was that the product just wasn't what people imagined it would be.
When Alexa was first announced in 2014, I thought, "OK, right now it can only do simple things like play a song on Spotify or tell you the weather. But they're going to iterate rapidly, and in 10 years we'll be talking to it like a computer from Star Trek."
The rapid progress of GPT-3 and friends seemed to confirm this.
But here we are in 2022 and... we're nowhere near Star Trek, nor even GPT-3-ish levels of conversation. There seemed to be a failure of imagination: you wanted some cool sci-fi stuff, maybe shared storytelling like AI Dungeon[0]. But you got triggers for home automation, which 90% of people don't care about.
I have different point of view - 90's Start Trek stuff is here - I can tell Alexa turn on the lights and it will happen. I can tell specific name of a room I want to off/on/dim/bright that I typed in while setting up my smart lights even.
In 90's Star Trek they also don't talk with computer much more than saying very specific commands and getting some response just like one would ask Alexa for a weather. I can also setup some sensors so it would give me status report if I want to.
You take voice recognition for granted - it is not easy - it was really not possible not that long ago on level we have now like even in 2000's.
From 1990's to today - I feel that I live in the future.
If you take Doctor the hologram or holosuite characters - well yeah AI of today is nowhere near and I believe it never will be - but as I say my mind is blowing up when I see level of voice recognition, image recognition, game engines of today compared to what was possible in 1990's or even 2000's.
Amazon is in a great market position to implement GPT-3 (or GPT-3-like AI) in Echos. I would pay a considerable premium on these assistants if Amazon could adapt their current features to the new generation of language models in useful ways.
The wealth of knowledge that language models like these have is fantastic. Although as Meta's Galactica has demonstrated, you can't just slap an input box on a pre-trained model and ship it. It needs to be much more integrated with useful services, and robust with fact-checking. But a company like Amazon should not have problems doing both (and more) if they would commit to it.
It's so sad to read about the mismanagement of this technology in the article. They have a tremendous stake in the world of AI assistants and I wish Amazon were more optimistic about the technology. Perhaps a conversational AI assistant could drive revenues itself (without the need of complex monetization).
The situation with Alexa and its ilk (as with GPT-3, Stable Diffusion, autonomous driving, etc.) seems to be yet another case where at one level the results are impressive but it's not nearly good enough to enable the really interesting use cases. So it devolves to basically short formulaic commands.
This makes sense based on my experiences with Alexa.
Starting in the last two years it has increasingly, and aggressively, started “advertising” skills and products following a voice request. So much so that I began looking into alternative voice engines.
Now I know why it was ramping up so quickly.
What I want from Alexa:
“Alexa, do this” Done.
What I get from Alexa:
“Hi there, let’s have a conversation where I pester you about products and ask questions about other things I can do, etc.”
> What I want from Alexa: “Alexa, do this” Done.
For what it's worth, this is largely how the Google Assistant works from my "smart" speakers.
“Alexa set timer for 8 minutes” “Done. By the way did you know that ….”
Jesus I just want to set a timer not be enlightened about some crappy skill that a pushy PM that’s going up for promo is trying for force engagement with.
Wonder if Alexa could predictively suggest ordering from uber eats? Like
- "You had a long day, shall I order pad thai for you?"
This is my issue with it. I have all the big three and Alexa was trying to sell me something every 3rd interaction. Its sits in a drawer.
I for one just don't like stuff I have the feeling I can't control. With those intelligent loudspeaker and microphone devices I have always the feeling I need to cut the power supply to switch it really of.
I do this even with my Chromecast. It's behind a remote controlled power plug that I turn on only when I'm about to watch something.
Meta and Amazon missed out on smartphones as a platform but both succeeded in other areas (VR headsets and Alexa). I guess it's apparent now that they both overpaid to get there.
I use my Google Nest hub to watch YouTube which shows me ads. I think Amazon should've doubled down on the Echo Show and video content delivery (they do own twitch after all). The real money for platforms like Alexa/echo is content delivery, associated ad revenue, and replacing your telephone -- not as a medium to buy more shit on Amazon. And I think all of this could've been achieved with a 10000+ person division.
Replacing the phone sounds like a very difficult task.
I use Apple TVs with the phone as a remote, but I wonder what kind of utility an Amazon device would have to provide for me to consider it over an Apple TV. And similarly for an Android user to consider an Amazon device over a Chromecast.
If anything, it makes me hopeful a surveillance device wasn’t able to get traction with most folks.
Indeed. I turned mine off as soon as I saw Alexa transcripts being used in court cases. If one can't conspire to commit crimes in one's own home, where can you?
Just a reminder for people that are looking for open source alternative that there is the Mark II that Mycroft is developing for years:
I’m actually considering getting rid of my devices. I just want to play a song, not be constantly pestered about Amazon Music Unlimited and other crap.
With privacy legislation getting strengthened every year it was probably becoming a huge liability.